Tuesday, May 27, 2008

So I was enjoying my long Memorial Day weekend when I got a text message from a buddy of mine whom I host and manage a website for. He said in his text that his website was hacked! Within minutes I checked into it. Indeed the main page was changed; not only for his site but others as well (including this one!). I called my web site server company about this and they confirmed this. The good news is it was only the main index.htm pages that got 'hacked'.

As to how the person(s) got into the site; well it could have been many things - a keylogger on a clients' machine, a security flaw in an online application such was Wordpress or a simple password crack/guess using automated "robots" (scripts). First thing I did was changing my root passwords and immediately changed the FTP and e-mail passwords for my friend. Needless to say in the coming days I will be looking into this further. A good time to cleanup old Wordpress installs that were used for testing as well as other scripts no longer used.

Saturday, May 17, 2008

My 2nd 5k EVER in 2 weeks. Not sure if it was overkill but it was something to shoot for. This one was in Chaska, MN and was a run/race to help raise money for a Veterans Memorial at a local park.

This run was quite different than the New Prague one - basically it was downhill for the first half and uphill the other half. Not as many people which made it a bit harder to keep up a competitive pace.

Overall I finished in 17th place with a time of 26 minutes 51 seconds (Results are posted here). Better than I thought given the condition of the course and how I was feeling! Not sure what race I'll do next, but plan on doing at least once a month and think I'll be doing a mini-triathlon at the end of summer!

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Well, the results are in. And the results were better than expected! I finished in 99th place with a time of 25 minutes 31 seconds. There was no rain but it was a bit chilly. My friend Jason ran it in under 20 minutes and his wife was just a few minutes behind me. See the official results here.Overall it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. At least I have base time for my next 5k this weekend!

I guess i slipped from the initial postings. I placed 101th place. View my results here.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

With the coming and (passing) of the Wisconsin and Minnesota fishing openers, I thought I'd post a little Do-It-Yourself thing I did a few fishing seasons ago. I made a few custom fishing rod cases out of PVC pipe. Although I made a few of them, I only use one because I can fit all 3 of my flyrods in one case! Check out the materials and instructions below:

Cut the pipe to appropriate size (I made one of mine 5' long) and connect and cement all the fittings (except the plug of course). I bought all my materials from Home Depot and the guy in the dept actually glued the female adapter and cap on for me in the store! Once they were dry, i bought some green and tan spray paint and painted the body one color and the end caps the other color. I made 2 of these rod cases for about $20! Only downside is the paint seems to scratch off the PVC somewhat easy. I may try and sand down the pipe then paint it again. Good luck!

Friday, May 2, 2008

The other night when I was scrambling to practice some songs I needed to get down for a audition, I realized something wasn't right. My whole iTunes Library wasn't being found! Well, I didn't panic because I've seen this before and was fixable. All I need to do is reboot my computer; sometimes network issues wack it out the connection between iTunes and my network share temporarily. Anyway, after rebooting my computer it still wasn't finding them! At this point I made the semi-sprint trot downstairs to check out my server. It was then I realized something wasn't right. My data was there but performance trying to open the drive was slow and on top of that I was hearing some noise from the drive itself! "Uh oh.", I thought.

After playing (yeah, thats the technical term) with it for about 20 minutes I decided I better try and pull off data while its still running (fearing as soon as I powered it off it would never come back to life). So I scrambled to find any large capacity drives that I had available and immediately went to critical files. Seeing this drive had both my music collection and my life backup of pictures, documents and other stuff, I went straight for backing up the the critical stuff like photos.

I was able to pull them off without issue. However the rest of the data was a long tedious process. I had to constantly monitor sometimes the copy would fail sometimes it work work. At several points, I had to power off the drive so I could try and re-copy files off! The good news is I did have a full backup already on anotehr drive, but it was from a few months ago. I am now using that full backup (from 2 months ago) as my starting point and filling in all the new photos, files and MP3's from what I pulled off the bad hard drive.

After I pulled everything off the bad drive I downloaded and ran some diagnostic tools from Western Digital (the manufacturer of the bad drive). After confirming the drive had some bad sectors on it and was basically trash, I looked around on their site for warranty info. My drive out of warranty but discovered they offer a discount on a new drive as long as you enter in the previous models' serial number. Check that info out here.

Needless to say, I have a replacement 500Gb drive on its way! So by the time I get it, I should be back up and running and will be able to use this new drive as a redundant drive backup source.